Google now ranks slow mobile sites lower. Here is what that means for yours.

Google announced it in January and switched it on this month: the speed of your site on a phone is now part of how it ranks in mobile search. Google says only the slowest sites are affected for now. In our experience, "the slowest sites" describes most small-business websites we are asked to look at.

Why Google cares

Because the people searching care. Half of mobile visitors give up on a page that takes more than a few seconds. Google would rather send them somewhere that loads. Speed is not a technical vanity metric; it is the difference between a customer and a bounce.

Check yours in two minutes

Open Google's PageSpeed Insights, type your address, look at the mobile result. Do not obsess over the score. Read the list underneath: it tells you, in order, what is slowing the page down. Then open your own site on your phone, on mobile data, not Wi-Fi, and count.

What actually makes sites slow

We have looked under the bonnet of a lot of them. It is almost always the same five things.

• Huge images. A 4 MB photo straight from the camera, displayed at the size of a stamp. This alone is most of the problem on most sites. Resize and compress; the visitor will not see the difference, the phone will.
• Too many plugins. Every plugin adds its own scripts and styles to every page, whether that page uses them or not. Thirty plugins is thirty round trips before your content shows.
• The theme. Off-the-shelf themes are built to do everything for everyone, so they load everything for everyone. A site that needs a heading and a photo carries a slider library, an animation library and three icon fonts.
• Fonts from everywhere. Four families from two services is eight files before a single word appears. Pick one, two at most.
• Cheap hosting. The server takes a second to think before it sends anything. No amount of front-end work fixes a slow server.

What we do about it

Build light in the first place. Our sites carry exactly what they need: sized images, one font, no plugin stack, a server that answers quickly. It is not magic; it is restraint. The result is a site that was fast before Google started measuring, and stays fast as your content grows.

If yours fails the two-minute check, it is usually fixable without a rebuild — images and plugins first. Send us the address and we will tell you which of the five it is.